Answering form-based web queries using the data-mining approach

Web users often post queries through form-based interfaces on the Web to retrieve data from the Web; however, answers to these queries are mostly computed according to keywords entered into different fields specified in a query interface, and their precision and recall could be low. The precision and recall ratios in answering this type of query can be improved by considering closely related previous queries submitted through the same interface, along with their answers. In this paper, we present an approach for enhancing the retrieval of relevant answers to a form-based Web query by adopting the data-mining approach using previous, relevant queries and their answers. Experimental results on a randomly selected set of 3,800 documents retrieved from various Web sites show that our data-mining, query-rewriting approach achieves average precision and true positive ratios on rewritten queries in the upper 80% range, whereas the average false positive ratio is less than 2.0%. Work partially done during a visit to BYU and partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 60503036 and Fok YingTong Education Foundation No. 104027.